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Abstract

During the summer of 1847 the impact of famine, disease, and social upheaval in Ireland was felt in port cities across the North Atlantic World. As an important hub of commerce and migration, Montreal was deeply affected by these events. The arrival of thousands of Irish migrants, many of whom had contracted typhus during their journey, touched off a contentious debate in the city. An engaged and alarmed public threw their support behind a proposal put forward by representatives of the municipal government that called for the construction of an elaborate quarantine facility just down the St. Lawrence River from the city. This facility, which migrants would be confined at until their healthy status was confirmed beyond reasonable doubt, promised to return order not only to Montreal, but to the entire migration process. The body appointed by the colonial administration, however, rejected the proposal, and tabled a far more modest plan that would continue to house migrants in sheds located just a stone’s throw away from the city’s western suburbs. The highly charged debate that ensued furnishes us with an opportunity to examine how the city’s political elite and the broader public were thinking through questions about migration, public health, and the contours of liberal governance. The objective of this article is to consider the role that moments of crisis such as this played in shaping the city’s political culture, and to place the events of 1847 in the context of the larger struggle between local and metropolitan authority occurring during this period.

Corps de l’article

In 1847 an epidemic outbreak of typhus gripped Montreal from the outset of the
shipping season to the end of the summer. By the end of 1847, 6,000 had succumbed to the
fever and over 11,000 men, women and children had been hospitalized — some at the General
Hospital, but most at the emigrant sheds that had been erected along the banks of the
Lachine Canal on the city’s southwestern periphery.[2] The
impact of the disease was experienced most intensely by the emigrants who were in the
midst of fleeing the famine in Ireland. Typhus, which struck victims down with high
fevers, rashes, and delirium, flourished on board the cramped and filthy ships that
emigrants boarded to make the transatlantic voyage. Spread by lice, the disease preyed on
those who had been weakened by hunger and dislocation, and who circumstances had forced to
reside in unhygienic conditions, thus leading observers to refer to the illness
colloquially as “camp fever,” “jail fever,” or “ship fever.”[3] Montreal was not alone in its confrontation with typhus in 1847 — the disease
spread along the pathways being created by the out-migration of the Irish from their
homeland, a phenomena that was linked to crop failure, the transformation of social
relations and agricultural practices brought on by the region’s transition to a market
economy and the unwillingness of metropolitan officials in London to interfere with how
landlords managed their private property. It was this governmental inaction that has led
historians of the famine to frame it as a crisis in liberal governance, an approach that
this article attempts to build upon by examining the impact that the famine and the
ensuing migration had on Montreal.[4]

The events of 1847 reinforced existing connections and similarities between Montreal
and other port cities in North America, Britain, and Western Europe. While the epidemic
did not spread deeply into the general population, it thrust what was then British North
America’s largest city and commercial hub into a profound crisis. Civic élites were forced
to contemplate how their city would flourish in an age marked by mass migration and the
emergence of an urban poor composed disproportionately of recent migrants to the area. In
the midst of the epidemic, with a public demanding decisive action and tensions building
between the municipal and colonial administrations, heated debates occurred over the role
of the state, the validity of public opinion, and the rights of destitute emigrants. The
typhus epidemic of 1847 must therefore be read not only as a crucial turning point in the
history of public health in Montreal, but also as an opportunity to consider how the
public was thinking through a variety of issues related to urban colonial governance
during a turbulent and transformative decade in the city’s history.

This article focuses on one of the most divisive debates that emerged in the city
during the epidemic. The issue at stake was the quarantine policy adopted by the colonial
administration, which involved inspecting incoming emigrants at Grosse Îsle, just down the
river from Quebec City, before allowing them to proceed up the St. Lawrence River to
Montreal, where those who were subsequently found to still be displaying symptoms of
typhus were once again confined to sheds built along the banks of the Lachine Canal. As
the epidemic worsened, a group of civic élites in Montreal became increasingly vocal
critics of a policy they lambasted as insufficient. What was at stake here, they
thundered, were the lives of Montreal’s citizens, who had been offered little in the way
of protection from the coming crisis. They insisted that the only prudent course of action
was to build another facility down the river from Montreal, where emigrants would be
compelled to pass through a second layer of examination and quarantine before being
permitted to migrate further up the river. The debate that ensued between proponents of
these two plans provide us with a glimpse into how urban élites and the broader public
were thinking through the challenges their community faced as a hub of transnational
migration. It demonstrates how the contours of mid-nineteenth century liberal governance
were being negotiated in an atmosphere of crisis, as commentators, administrators, and
politicians weighed in on how to best balance the rights of emigrants to circulate freely
— with the needs and wishes of the general public that wanted to be protected from the
social disorder that they associated with mass migration. This debate shows how, in a
decade marked by fierce political and sectarian conflict, élites engaged in the project of
governing Montreal used the debates surrounding the typhus epidemic to bolster assertions
that they were legitimate wielders of power and authority. Finally, it demonstrates how
events occurring on the ground in Montreal were pulled into the larger orbit of the
struggle between local, colonial, and metropolitan officials for jurisdictional authority.

This reading of Montreal’s 1847 typhus epidemic is an attempt to place the events
and the debates that took place that year in two vibrant bodies of literature. The first
is a literature that has emerged in recent years that explores the transformation of
British North America’s political culture in the mid-nineteenth century. An increasingly
engaged local public[5] was demanding a more effective voice
in government affairs, lashing out at the small clique of anti-democratic colonial
officials who had enjoyed the benefits of nearly unfettered access to the levers of
political power since the earliest days of the colonial project. The political order that
emerged out of the ensuing conflicts might have paid lip service to the democratic ideals
that were circulating the North Atlantic world during this period, but was itself based on
a dynamic process of exclusion.[6] In their efforts to wrest
control over colonial affairs away from unelected representatives of the metropole, local
élites continuously put forward the argument that their newfound authority was legitimate
because they possessed a knot of character traits that made them suitable for the
position.[7] These highly contested and politicized traits
were rooted in gender, race, and class. In this discourse, only elite white men were
deemed capable of possessing and refining the restrained and independent character needed
to govern a tumultuous colonial outpost.

It was not only the composition of the political élite that changed during this
period, but their approach to governance and authority. While this process of
transformation was gradual, uneven and contested, there was a growing tendency amongst
those with access to political authority to define, identify, and attempt to manage a
myriad of social problems linked to rapid urbanization, such as crime, disease, and
poverty. Social relations during this period were marked by the establishment of numerous
institutions devoted to this broader project, including but not limited to schools,
prisons, hospitals, and orphanages, many of which were founded and governed by religious
bodies.[8] It was the liberal rhetoric of the day that
provided the ideological foundation for this project. This rhetoric was shaped by an
effort to balance rights with a vision of an orderly society that privileged a property
holding élite in the face of popular unrest and social upheaval. This vision caused them
to be wary of excessive government intervention in areas that encroached upon what were
seen as part of the domain of private initiatives — like migration and public health.
Rather than targeting social problems with a sweeping and authoritarian approach, liberal
theorists maintained that élites could establish and foster an orderly society by
reforming the disorderly traits of consenting individuals, and that this could be carried
out without encroaching too deeply on their rights and liberties.[9] In both major and minor ways, the theories and practices of authority that
flowed out of these ideas was changing the relationship between people and the
state.[10] How government officials and the broader public
responded to an outbreak of epidemic disease became a crucial test of how a society went
about putting these ideas into practice.

The second body of literature engaged with here is that which explores the
connections between epidemic disease, social conflict, and the emergence of the state. For
decades, historians have studied the tendency that epidemics have to spark and deepen
conflicts between different racial, ethnic, or class communities.[11] Further fuel is added to these conflicts because epidemics frequently prompt
the state to intervene more forcefully in people’s lives, and often in ways that further
empowered already dominant social groups. This was especially true given that scientific
debates were still dominated by the miasmatic theory of disease transmission, which led
officials and the public to place much of the blame and suspicion for epidemic outbreaks
on the community’s poorest members, who had no choice but to live in cramped and
unhygienic dwellings. Examining how a city with numerous ethnic, class, and sectarian
cleavages experienced and addressed the social, political and cultural disorder of an
epidemic outbreak can allow us to deepen our understanding of how the complex politics
surrounding public health played out in a local context.

The typhus epidemic struck Montreal just as a cluster of interconnected social,
cultural, and economic transitions were already fuelling an atmosphere of instability,
uncertainty and conflict. The city had long been the commercial hub of British North
America, but the consequences of changing economic patterns in the global economy were
beginning to be felt by labourers and merchants, as the scale of global commerce was
growing on the eve of industrialization.[12] Social
relations were increasingly marked by the strains of economic polarization. While the rich
were growing wealthier through commerce and investment in property and transportation
infrastructure, the ranks of the urban poor were rapidly growing. The majority of the
migrants arriving in Montreal were being pushed into work that was precarious, dangerous,
and which paid such low wages that surviving in this environment required tremendous
thrift and careful strategizing.[13] For Montreal’s poorest
residents, opportunities were narrowing. The ambition to establish themselves as
independent farmers that had motivated many Irish migrants to embark on the harrowing
transatlantic journey, was quickly slipping from their grasp as British North America’s
agricultural frontier began to close.

The massive wave of migration into the city made a significant impact on its
demographic composition. Not only was the population growing, from under 40,000 in the
1830s to nearly 50,000 by 1847, but the linguistic balance of the city was shifting, as
this growth was being driven by a significant influx of migrants from Ireland and the
British Isles that made this a rare moment when French speakers were a minority in the
city, a shift that helped fuel the decade’s ethnic conflicts.[14] These economic and demographic shifts were being played out against the
backdrop of a political crisis that had been simmering in the colony since the first
decades of the century that, amongst other things, centred on the demands of the French
Canadian élite for more effective political representation. They demanded an end to the
political arrangement in place since the British conquest of New France in 1763, which
allowed a small British Protestant minority to maintain a tight grip on the levers of
political power.[15] These political tensions, which
frequently took on an ethnic hue, spilled over into collective violence on a number of
occasions, most notably with armed rebellions in 1837 and 1838, and with scattered but
regular confrontations on the streets of Montreal throughout the 1840s.[16]

Other cultural and political transitions were also making an impact during this
period, and would leave an indelible mark on the city’s reaction to the typhus epidemic.
After playing a more modest role in previous decades, the Catholic Church was beginning to
assert itself as a major social, cultural, and political force during this period.[17] The typhus epidemic, when the tasks of providing the bulk of
the medical care and overseeing much of the charitable work was handed off to the church,
played a crucial role in this shift.[18] The startling pace
of growth was also inspiring a group of elites, drawn from across the ethnic, linguistic,
and sectarian divide, to become increasingly engaged in the project of reforming the urban
environment. Their activism touched on everything from demanding that the sale of alcohol
be more carefully regulated to demanding a greater police presence on the city’s streets
and public spaces. The epidemic provided this group of engaged bourgeois Montrealers with
vital ammunition. They maintained that the prevalence of disease in Montreal was linked to
the cluster of social and environmental ills that they were already committed to fighting
against.[19]

Disease played a pivotal role in the social, political, and cultural transformations
that gripped Montreal in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Epidemics were the
product of the sharp spike in human migration that occurred during the 1840s. With private
actors involved in the migration process looking to maximize their profits and a
government unwilling to impose regulations, migrants were often shepherded through a
series of spaces — ships, workhouses, quarantine stations, and cramped dwellings — that
offered ideal conditions for the spread of disease. Not only did epidemic outbreaks
reflect the rapid urbanization that was occurring across the North Atlantic world during
this period, they had an indelible impact on that process. Disease pushed the residents of
communities like Montreal to ask questions about how their cities worked as hubs of
regional and transatlantic migration. The huge increase in the scale of migration that was
occurring in the middle of the 1840s demonstrates just how closely integrated Montreal was
into a network of transatlantic spaces — some urban and some rural — that were being
transformed by the strategies of capitalist development.[20]
More broadly speaking, the debates prompted by such discussions in turn raised questions
about who was to be included and excluded from the rights associated with citizenship. To
what degree did the authorities in these cities, be they civic or religious, bear
responsibility for the well-being of the thousands of migrants arriving in their ports
during this period? The arrival of unprecedented numbers of Irish migrants in the 1840s,
and the public health crisis that accompanied their arrival, revealed that the mechanisms
that existed in British North America for dealing with questions relating to migration,
poverty, and disease were no longer sufficient. This was not a theoretical discussion of
principles: The cost of providing care for Irish migrants stricken with the disease placed
a massive burden on the resources that the city had for supporting the needy. This was a
city that, because it functioned as a commercial and economic hub, was already struggling
to provide meagre assistance to the destitute men, women, and children who resided there.
Many argued that the community’s first priority ought to be caring for the poor who
already lived in Montreal, not the Irish migrants passing through the city.[21] Therefore, as political leaders and the broader public in the
city debated how to address the challenge of providing care for disease-stricken migrants,
they were also thinking through the limits of their legal and moral obligations towards
them.

The typhus epidemic brought the entire project of state intervention into question
in a sustained way for the first time since the cholera epidemic that struck the city in
1832. The three levels of government that had a stake in the city — local, colonial, and
imperial — adhered in different ways to a liberal political ideology that viewed prolonged
acts of state intervention warily. While temporary public health measures had been adopted
during the 1832 epidemic, they had not been maintained in intervening years, and there was
little regulation of migration into the colony during this period.[22] This hesitancy was especially problematic in the midst of an epidemic, a
challenge to public order that seemingly demanded intervention on a grand scale, in the
form not only of placing greater restrictions on migration into the colony, but also in
enforcing strict sanitary regulations, which was clearly a governmental leap into the
realm of private property. The typhus epidemic of 1847 therefore must be read as a crisis
that prompted the authorities and the public to confront long-standing practices and
challenge firmly entrenched ideological beliefs.

The first news that the city was at risk of being exposed to an epidemic began to
appear in the Montreal newspapers in the winter of 1847, as word began to spread outwards
from the British press that the situation in Ireland had become especially dire.[23] Reports began to emerge that suggested that the famine
conditions continued to plague Ireland, as had been the case since 1845, and that in the
ensuing rush to flee the country reported cases of typhus were becoming common.[24] Tenant farmers had become increasingly dependent on the potato,
as it was the only crop that could sustain a family on their subdivided plots of land.
Absentee landlords, meanwhile, were determined to wring as much profit as they could from
their holdings, further souring social relations and deepening the vulnerability of
Ireland’s rural poor.[25] When blight caused the potato crop
to fail nearly one million perished in the country, and roughly one million more fled in
search of a better life elsewhere.[26] Typhus and a handful
of other diseases thrived amidst the dire conditions that accompanied this massive
displacement of people.

Depending on an array of material, circumstances, and family strategies, this
out-migration of Irish peasants could follow a variety of paths. Many migrated first to
port cities along the west coast of England and Scotland — with Glasgow, Liverpool, and
Bristol being especially popular destinations for Irish migrants. While some established
themselves permanently in these teeming British cities, others plotted a longer migratory
route, if their financial resources permitted. For many Irish migrants, the promise that
North America offered was access to land. While some traveled directly from Irish ports to
North America, most landed first in Britain — most notably Liverpool — where they made
arrangements to travel onwards to North America.[27]

As rumors circulated that the wave of migration from Ireland would be as large if
not larger than that of the previous summer’s, officials in a number of American
jurisdictions, following the lead of the State of New York, aimed to staunch the flow of
migrants landing on their shores by imposing burdensome taxes and restrictions on
emigration.[28] With these penalties in place in time for
the shipping season of 1847, the vast majority of the Irish migrants with the resources
necessary to set out for the North American continent were left with little choice but to
migrate to British North America. While a minority chose to land in New Brunswick in
search of work in the booming timber industry there,[29]
most prepared to board ships that would deposit them at Grosse Îsle, the quarantine
station erected by the colonial authorities just down the river from Quebec City. In
theory, after passing medical inspection there, the emigrants would crowd onto steamboats
to travel further up the St. Lawrence River, deeper into the North American continent.

When word began to filter through colonial and imperial channels that the 1847
migration would be especially large, the administration projected a sense of confidence
that they could keep a handle on the situation. Extra personnel were hired at Grosse Îsle,
and the existing hospital infrastructure was reinforced. Once the St. Lawrence River
thawed and ships began arriving in the spring, though, it was not long before the massive
scale of the migration quickly overwhelmed even these upgraded facilities. Ships backed up
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, raising the ire of the colony’s business community, whose
tepid support for the practice of quarantine was predicated on it being as quick and
non-intrusive as possible. Medical officials had to quickly abandon their plans to carry
out thorough medical inspections of the migrants, and it was later revealed that these
inspections became rushed, thus opening up the possibility for oversights.[30]

It quickly became obvious to the residents of Montreal, both from reading local
papers and from witnessing the events that were transpiring on their city’s waterfront,
that the daunting scale of the 1847 migration demanded a re-thinking of the emigration
policy and the infrastructure that existed to carry it out. The catalyst for this was the
collective realization that the quarantine station at Grosse Îsle was not doing enough to
separate the healthy from the sick. Some men, women and children who had contracted the
disease on the Atlantic passage were being waved through by medical officials at Grosse
Îsle because they were not yet outwardly demonstrating the symptoms of the disease, or
were successful in concealing these symptoms. Others who were declared healthy at Grosse
Îsle contracted typhus after being jammed back onto the steamboats that carried them up
the St. Lawrence River to Montreal. Thus, the colonial government’s assurance to the
public at the outset of the shipping season that the facilities and personnel already in
place down the river from Quebec City would be capable of serving as a cordon sanitaire fell quickly into disrepute.

As the potential severity of the typhus epidemic became increasingly evident, the
municipal government passed Bylaw 186, which created a Board of Health charged with
coordinating the city’s efforts against typhus.[31] The body
was given sweeping powers that would allow them to reverse any decision made by competing
institutions, including City Council and Trinity House, the body that governed the
harbour. They would oversee any future construction of public health infrastructure, most
notably a new hospital that would be for the exclusive use of migrants and located near
the city limits. The Board of Health was also given the go-ahead to police the sanitary
condition of people’s private property, thus providing them the authority to order
citizens to immediately cleanse residences and empty lots that they owned. Any individual
convicted of ignoring the authority of the board or otherwise interfering with their
efforts was threatened with steep fines and a possible prison sentence.[32]

The considerable powers given over to the hastily convened Board of Health by City
Council is interesting on a number of fronts. First, it demonstrates that after months of
trying to gauge whether or not the threat of typhus was to be taken seriously, Montreal’s
civic élites were now prepared to react vigorously to the situation. Second, it
demonstrates that these same civic élites were conscious that the dense nest of
overlapping jurisdictions in the area of emigration and public health posed a severe
threat to their efforts to protect the city from a typhus outbreak. The imperial
government, the colonial authorities, the city council, Trinity House, and private
citizens all had a stake in implementing the reforms that they felt were needed to
effectively carry out a campaign against the epidemic.

While the city council handed over their jurisdiction on this matter with apparent
enthusiasm, the Board of Health had to take an aggressive stance when it came to other
levels of government. In their first report, published in the Gazette a few weeks after it was founded, the Board of
Health forcefully declared that although the colonial government had bankrolled and
overseen the construction of the sheds that were housing the Irish emigrants on the banks
of the Lachine Canal, they were located within the city limits and were thus under civic
jurisdiction. Therefore, any future decision that might be reached by the board regarding
the location or utilization of the sheds would have to be made exclusively by the Board of
Health. They ended this section of their preliminary report by extending a meagre olive
branch to the colonial officials involved in the operation of the emigrant sheds and with
the administration of emigration in general by noting that the men appointed to the Board
of Health had “exposed themselves to a heavy responsibility on behalf of their fellow
citizens, are required to exercise an unceasing vigilance in this department, and
doubtless they will find in the Government Agents, at all times, most ready and willing
assistants.”[33] By defining their colonial counterparts as
little more than eager assistants, the Board of Health was forcefully declaring its
primacy in coordinating the battle against typhus.

This sort of confident assertiveness is hardly surprising, given the composition of
the Board of Health. The city’s mayor, John Easton Mills, chaired the body. Illustrating
the degree to which public health continued to be conceived primarily as a law and order
issue, the entire municipal Police Commission was included in its ranks. These were civic
élites who already had a stake in overseeing efforts to bring about a more orderly urban
environment. The commission had met on a regular basis since the municipality was
established at the beginning of the decade, and fielded petitions and complaints relating
not only to the police force, but to any matter that could be placed under the umbrella of
public order. Its members included prominent local figures like Jean-Louis Beaudry, John
Glennon, and Alfred Larocque. The Board of Health’s membership was rounded out by the
appointment of a doctor and a prominent citizen from each of the city’s seven wards, a
process that insured that the body reflected the city’s ethnic composition.[34] Like other municipal bodies established in the city during this
period, the Board of Health was composed of men from both sides of Montreal’s ethnic and
political divide.

The colonial administration responded by convening the Emigrant Committee that had
been founded in 1840 to deal with issues that related to managing migration. This body,
unlike the municipal Board of Health, did not attempt to reflect the city’s ethnic
heterogeneity, instead drawing its members from the city’s British Protestant élite, the
majority of whom were supporters of the current Tory administration. It included Samuel
Mathewson, Jacob DeWitt, John Leeming, William Workman, and was chaired by Adam Ferrie,
one of the city’s leading commercial magnates. Interestingly, John Easton Mills was also
appointed to the Emigrant Committee, perhaps in an effort to demonstrate a colonial
openness to local input.

The Board of Health quickly weighed in on the two major governance issues that had
emerged from the typhus epidemic. First, they underlined the fundamental importance of
sanitary reform. “Citizens,” they proclaimed, “have a duty to follow the directions laid
out by the board about waste disposal.”[35] The report
explained how disease was linked to the manner in which waste was disposed of in densely
populated cities like Montreal, where garbage dumped in the winter decomposed in the
summer, “creating harmful effluvia that poisons the air in large neighbourhoods.”[36] This was not, they emphasized, an undertaking that could be
carried out by a small group of activists, but one that needed to be imposed upon every
resident of the city. A family that chose to follow the sanitary directives laid out by
the board could still be placing themselves in immense danger if their neighbours were
less engaged with the issue, as they “must endure the nuisance equally with the dirty
people who have caused it.”[37]

These concerns about the city’s sanitary conditions did not originate with the
typhus outbreak. Demands that more investment be made and regulations enforced with
regards to garbage disposal, drainage, and sewerage had risen to the top of the agenda of
reform-oriented civic élites across Britain, Europe, and North America, and an outbreak of
epidemic diseases simply provided more justification for their agenda. This was due in
large part to the widespread belief that these sorts of diseases flourished in unhealthy
environments.[38] The minutes of the Board of Health’s
bi-weekly meetings, frequently reprinted in the local press, are filled with local
residents testifying about threats to public health they had encountered in their own
neighbourhoods. This often entailed providing damaging information about their neighbours
— acts that might very well have been rooted in longstanding interpersonal
conflicts.[39]

The centre-piece of the Board of Health’s response to the typhus epidemic was its
proposal to relocate the emigrant sheds. Rather than housing the Irish emigrants along the
banks of the Lachine Canal basin on the city’s southwestern fringe, the board’s plan
called on the colonial government to hand over the funds necessary to build a new
quarantine station on land that was more removed from the city. After weighing the merits
of a number of locations, they proposed building a facility on the Îles-de-Boucherville,
which were located 20 kilometres down the St. Lawrence River from Montreal’s
harbour.[40] To members of the board there was little
downside to this proposal. As thousands of destitute and ill migrants continued to pour
into Montreal every week the sheds along the Lachine Canal, located just a stone’s throw
from the city’s swelling western suburbs, were quickly approaching their maximum capacity.

At the beginning of July a delegation of civic élites from Montreal wrote a lengthy
letter to Governor Elgin to warn him that the current infrastructure in place on Grosse
Îsle would not be sufficient. They warned Elgin that the disease could spread quickly
through the interior even if only a handful of infected people managed to slip past the
overburdened medical officials stationed there. They urged the governor to intervene in
London to demand that the imperial government engage with the issue.[41] Elgin responded to the petition nearly one month later, and offered little of
substance. He assured the petitioners that he had been keeping the Secretary of State of
War and the Colonies informed about the epidemic, and that the entire imperial
administration was deeply saddened by the suffering that the epidemic had unleashed. He
paid tribute to the clergymen and women who risked their lives on a daily basis to provide
compassion and care to the emigrants in their moment of desperation, and agreed in
principle that the emigrant sheds would be more secure if they were located further away
from the city. But Elgin was not prepared to leap into action. Moving the sheds was a
proposal that would have to come under a great deal more study, and there was no chance
that a decision could be made before the following summer. This response, with its demands
for patience, provided little comfort to those who were demanding that the imperial
government snap into action with swift and sweeping reforms.

The views of Montrealers on the unfolding crisis were shaped by their strong sensory
experience of the crisis, which they reached simply by walking down to the city’s
waterfront, where they could see destitute migrants suffering the agonies of typhus while
sprawled across the harbour’s wharves. In early June, Trinity House had passed a series of
new ordinances that forced steamboat operators carrying more than 100 passengers from
Grosse Îsle to drop them off directly at the emigrant sheds rather than in the harbour,
but the ordinances were frequently ignored.[42] A Board of
Health report published in the local press at the beginning of July contained testimony
from Dr. McCulloch that underlined the inability of the authorities to enforce the more
stringent measures it was adopting during this crisis. McCulloch noted that after one of
their recent meetings at City Hall he joined the mayor in a small delegation that made its
way down to the port, where they witnessed several people who were evidently quite ill
lying about. To the great surprise of the delegation, their visit coincided with the
arrival of The Queen, one of the largest
steamboats that worked the Montreal-Quebec City corridor on the St. Lawrence River. The
ship docked at the port and dropped off 831 men, women, and children. Many appeared to be
on the brink of death, and the delegation overheard that there had been casualties on
board the ship during the short trip from the quarantine station at Grosse Îsle.

What caused more hand-wringing amongst the members of the Board of Health than the
condition of the emigrants was the lack of government personnel on the ground at the port
when the ship arrived. They later ascertained that the emigration agent appointed by the
colonial government had temporarily left the city.[43] It
was left to the members of the board to track down a police officer to have the migrants
hauled away to the sheds, and McCulloch thundered in his testimony that more care should
be taken by the authorities in making sure that the emigrants were being confined either
to the sheds or the tents surrounding the General Hospital.[44] This must have been a bleak reminder to the members of the Board of Health of
just how easily emigrants, who were so clearly stricken with typhus, could slip into the
general population of the city.

Eye-witness accounts also revealed that there was a considerable degree of social
interaction occurring between the emigrants, who were meant to be in isolation at the
emigrant sheds, and Montrealers who lived in the surrounding neighbourhoods. When a farmer
in the village of St. Gabriel, which was adjacent to the sheds, came down with symptoms of
typhus, his family reported that emigrants who were meant to be under quarantine were
slipping away from the medical personnel and walking to their farm to purchase
milk.[45] Élite newspapers also warned their readers that
the disease could spread directly into their homes if they hired domestic servants who had
either passed through the sheds or come into contact with family members who had done so.
They held up the example of the MacKay family, who had lost one family member to typhus in
this manner.[46]

In a city living under the ominous threat of an epidemic outbreak, though, seeing
these men, women, and children on the cusp of death on the wharves raised serious doubts
about the ability of the authorities to protect the city’s residents from the disease.
Advocating for the Îles-de-Boucherville plan became the public’s outlet for voicing their
concerns about the colonial administration’s handling of the epidemic. With disease lying
in wait on the city’s doorstep, they argued, how could anyone with the public interest in
mind oppose a plan that would see the sick and destitute migrants quarantined until any
lingering doubts about their health were put to rest? La
Minerve, Montreal’s leading French-language newspaper, expressed its support
for the Îles-de-Boucherville plan in this sort of language, noting that the public had the
right to protect themselves during a calamity of this magnitude. The people of Montreal,
they argued, would not stand by while thousands of contagious migrants continued to be
housed in sheds a short walk from the port and the city’s western suburbs. They encouraged
the public to make their voices heard if the government did not acquiesce to their
demand.[47]

Supporters of the Îles-de-Boucherville proposal insisted that this was simply the
most reasonable solution for the colonial administration to take.[48] They drafted a letter to Governor Elgin that highlighted all of the plan’s
benefits. Unlike the sheds on the banks of the Lachine Canal Basin, the proposed facility
would be able to serve effectively as a quarantine station, as travel between Montreal and
the Îles-de-Boucherville would be difficult. The land available on the islands would make
it far easier to segregate migrants infected with communicable diseases from those who
were simply worn down from the taxing transatlantic voyage. The Îles-de-Boucherville plan
was also made to appeal to those who were worried that these thousands of destitute
migrants would loiter on the streets of Montreal over the winter, thereby becoming drains
on charitable institutions, not to mention a threat to public order. Under the Board of
Health’s proposal, Montreal could be partially if not entirely extricated from the
migratory path of the Irish — who would be able to board steamboats for the western
hinterlands from the new quarantine station.[49]

The new quarantine station was also defended as a more humane alternative to the
current arrangement. Eye-witness accounts of daily life at the sheds printed in the local
press painted a grim portrait of destitute and fever-stricken migrants crammed into narrow
bunks that lined the hastily constructed buildings devoid almost entirely of
sunlight.[50] Building the new quarantine station on the
Îles-de-Boucherville provided the colonial government with an opportunity to wipe the
slate clean — the plan to quarantine emigrants at the sheds on the Lachine Canal Basin
was, after all, devised by the authorities before they were able to grasp the full
magnitude of the 1847 migration. The reform-oriented liberalism of the period was summoned
as a means of legitimizing the plan: A new facility could be made better equipped to
foster the transformation of destitute migrants into productive citizens.

The colony’s leading medical journal, the British
American Journal of Medical and Physical Science, published a number of
editorials over the course of the epidemic and its immediate aftermath that documented
Montreal’s handling of the crisis, the events unfolding at Grosse Îsle, and summarized the
latest research into how typhus spread. The journal’s editorial position suggests that
there was widespread support in the medical community for stricter quarantine policies.
Writing in August, as the debate over the colonial administration’s refusal to fund the
plan proposed by the Board of Health reached its climax, the editor of the journal noted
his vigorous support for the Îles-de-Boucherville plan. Citing research into typhus and
other fevers that were contracted on board overcrowded and poorly ventilated ships, the
editorial pointed to evidence that a considerable number of people who contracted these
illnesses only did so weeks after disembarking at their port of destination. With that
being the case, the editorial called upon the colonial government to impose a quarantine
of somewhere between three weeks and one month.[51]

Advocates of the Îles-de-Boucherville plan were also able to draw upon the
conventional wisdom of the period, which linked the spread of contagious diseases to
insalubrious environments from which unhealthy miasmas spread.[52] The land where the emigrant sheds were located was considered by adherents to
this theory of contagion to be particularly problematic. In demanding that the emigrant
sheds be moved, they noted that the low-lying land the sheds had been built on was
notorious for flooding. One resident familiar with the area rose to speak at one of the
mass public meetings held at Bonsecours Market to demonstrate public support for the
second quarantine station and reported that the area was often dotted with pools of
stagnant water, which were closely linked to disease in the public imagination during this
period.[53] The presence of these sorts of cesspools,
especially when combined with the stifling humidity of a Montreal summer, was the perfect
environment for an outbreak of an epidemic disease to appear and spread. If diseases like
typhus were hatched in noxious environments and spread through the air, having the sheds
located on land that perfectly fit that description such a short distance from Montreal’s
most populous neighbourhoods gave residents of the city reason to be concerned. This was
not the only environmental drawback to the current arrangement — a number of commentators
noted that the authorities ought to be concerned that emigrants were drinking and bathing
in water that was shared by Montrealers. The Îles-de-Boucherville quarantine station would
have the added benefit of relocating emigrants down the river from Montreal.[54]

Those who favoured the miasmatic theory of disease transmission decried the current
location of the emigrant sheds. For them, the benefit of the Board of Health’s plan was
that it would move emigrants closer to the river, where the diseases that they had
acquired during their migration would be pushed away by the stiff breezes on St. Lawrence
River. This group lent their support to any plan that put the emigrants in closer
proximity to the river. A letter printed in the Gazette
made the case for housing the emigrants on Île Ste-Hélène, located directly
across from Montreal’s harbourfront, and argued, “what a difference would it then prove to
the parched lips of the poor emigrant, to have at his side abundance of this almost
necessary element to his recovery.”[55]

Supporters of the Îles-de-Boucherville plan maintained that there was a social logic
to it as well. Not only would a new quarantine station on the Îles-de-Boucherville be more
beneficial to the health of the emigrants, but it would also protect them from the
criminal elements who preyed on the destitute men, women, and children shortly after
landing in Montreal. Cheating desperate emigrants out of money and personal effects had
become something of a cottage industry along the city’s waterfront, and advocates of the
new quarantine station insisted that “sharpers” would be unable to ply their trade if the
emigrant sheds were removed from the Lachine Canal Basin.[56] Rumours were circulating that young female Irish emigrants were turning to
prostitution, an accusation that was confirmed by an anonymous gentlemen with links to the
Magdalene Asylum, who told the Gazette that
several young women had sought refuge with the Magdalene sisters after being lured into
the trade. This was put forward by supporters of the Board of Health as further evidence
that the current arrangement with the sheds was doing no favours to the emigrants.[57]

The numerous arguments put forward by supporters of the Îles-de-Boucherville plan
return to a single common thread — that unlike what was currently occurring on the banks
of the Lachine Canal Basin, the proposed new facility would be able to function
effectively as a quarantine station. While providing a humane refuge to emigrants that
would be conducive to their physical rehabilitation, the new facility would be able to
prevent contact between sick emigrants, their healthy counterparts, and the people of
Montreal. The plan was pitched as a way to return order to the emigration process, which
had crumbled into disarray due to the sheer magnitude of the 1847 migration and the public
health crisis that accompanied it. With the emigrants and the facilities needed to house
and care for them moved out of the city to an island down the St. Lawrence River and
accessible only to medical personnel, civic officials, and religious aid workers, the
scenes of disorder that had been making such a profound sensory impact on Montreal since
the beginning of the shipping season would be removed. There would be no more gaunt
figures lying in agony on the wharves, no more tents hastily erected on the grounds of the
Montreal General Hospital, and no more fever sheds lurking ominously on the city’s
southwestern fringe. The movement in support of the plan can thus be read as an attempt on
the part of a group of civic élites to restore public confidence in their ability to
govern effectively and rationally in the midst of a profound public crisis. This was
particularly important at a moment when their authority was being challenged and resisted
in very visible ways. Steamboat operators were ignoring the emergency regulations put in
force by the Board of Health[58] and migrants were moving
back and forth between town and the emigrant sheds with impunity, two acts that the public
viewed as evidence that civic officials were struggling to assert their authority in the
midst of the crisis.

After carefully weighing the benefits of the Îles-de-Boucherville plan, the Emigrant
Committee appointed by the colonial administration announced in July to howls of public
indignation that they would not be pursuing the proposal. While facing widespread
accusations that they were being reckless with regards to the public health, the men
appointed to the Emigrant Committee carefully laid out their justification for maintaining
the status quo. They led off by stating that the Board of Health had simply not put a
great deal of thought into the logistics of the plan, noting that building a
state-of-the-art quarantine facility on an island that was a considerable distance from
the city was not a realistic proposal in the midst of a public crisis. Even at the
existing sheds, local authorities were reportedly struggling to keep labourers on the
payroll, given their legitimate fears about contracting typhus from the emigrants confined
in the area.[59] As was often the case when epidemic
diseases prompted governing officials to consider adopting quarantine measures, the
authorities in question struggled to balance the competing demands of a public for
protection from contagious diseases, migrants resistant to being prodded by doctors and
detained against their will, and commercial interests who protested against any impediment
to the shipping industry.[60]

The Emigrant Committee further justified its decision by maintaining that the
proposal to move the emigrants to the Îles-de-Boucherville would have infringed too
dramatically on the rights of emigrants. From the migrant’s perspective, after all, the
proposal put forward by the Board of Health would require them to pass through two
quarantine stations before being allowed to settle in British North America. For an Irish
man, woman, or child, the migration undertaken in 1847 likely began in a rural village
crumbling under the pressure of famine, typhus, and social violence, and was then followed
by a journey via steamboat to a port city on the west coast of Britain, already teeming
with other migrants struggling for food and shelter. Those who could afford it then
boarded ships for North America, which, even for those who had some means at their
disposal, was a harrowing experience. The transatlantic passage already concluded with a
long, chaotic, and likely intimidating interlude in quarantine at Grosse Îsle, an
experience that the Board of Health and its supporters now wanted to compel them to repeat
as they neared Montreal.[61] The Emigrant Committee also
framed this moral argument in economic terms by noting that the colony would, in the
long-term, benefit from this influx of people who would surely become productive citizens.
“Should these fellow subjects ... be detained on an island,” their statement read, “they
would be almost forced to become dependent upon Government, by putting it out of their
power to make arrangements for themselves.”[62]

While the Emigrant Committee’s statement prompted a wave of public fury, it
illustrates a compelling alternative interpretation of the activities taking place on the
Montreal harbourfront throughout the summer of 1847. While the Board of Health, the
majority of civic élites, and what appears to have been a sizable swath of public opinion,
saw the desperation and misery of the Irish emigrants landing in the vicinity of the city
as a threat to public order, the Emigrant Committee saw the same scenes as a necessary
by-product of economic growth and a symbol of a particularly British drive towards
self-improvement in the face of crisis.[63] By dramatically
expanding the duration of the period emigrants spent sequestered in quarantine, the
Emigrant Committee argued, the plan proposed by Montreal’s Board of Health risked having
Irish migrants become dependent on government support. The report that they published drew
repeated attention to the fact that over half of the emigrants who had passed through
Montreal since the beginning of 1847 had paid for their own transatlantic passage, and had
thereby earned the right to be treated judiciously by the authorities there, despite the
public’s concerns about disease. These numbers, they argued, were high despite the misery
and deprivation that marred the migration of 1847. In previous years, over three quarters
of the emigrants arriving from Ireland and the British Isles had paid for their own
passage. The underlying message here was that colonial officials were concerned that the
Board of Health’s proposals would have the long-term consequence, be it intentional or
not, of damaging the Province of Canada’s ability to attract self-sufficient emigrants to
the colony.[64]

The Emigrant Committee concluded its response to the Board of Health by asking some
pointed questions about the sort of government that citizens desired. The plan that they
were rejecting, while wrapped in a hearty dose of rhetoric about protecting residents of
Montreal and providing a secure and salubrious refuge to the weary emigrant, was, in fact,
built upon a foundation of “despotic” and “strenuous coercion.”[65] What looked like cold indifference to supporters of the Board of Health’s
plan was, the Emigrant Committee maintained, an attempt to balance the demands being made
by the Montreal public for decisive action with the rights of emigrants to not be confined
any more than was necessary.

In an effort to address the public outcry that they knew would greet their report,
the Emigrant Committee went to great lengths to assure the public that the measures
already taken by the colonial administration to address the typhus epidemic were adequate.
The public, they argued, simply needed to demonstrate a degree of patience and restraint.
They wrote that plans were already being undertaken to ensure that the time the emigrants
spent in close proximity to the city was minimized. In fact, the Emigrant Committee argued
that many of the supposed benefits of the Board of Health’s proposals were under
construction and would soon be integrated into the current arrangement. New fever
hospitals, which they hailed as being “spacious and airy,” were on the verge of completion
at Point St. Charles, which would allow for a much more effective segregation of the sick
from the healthy. By keeping all of these facilities in the vicinity of Montreal the
authorities would be able to identify the emigrants who had fallen ill while infringing as
lightly as possible on those who were healthy but had to remain in Montreal while their
family members recuperated in isolation.[66] While not
explicitly making a statement of regret for the way that the emigrant sheds had been
governed up to that point, the Emigrant Committee laid out its plans for the more
effective policing of the area surrounding the facility, noting that plans were being
drawn up for the construction of a strong fence around the facility, with gates guarded by
police officers tasked with preventing any communication with the outside world. Measures
would be put in place to move these healthy emigrants to new sheds constructed along the
Lachine Canal that would be free of disease. Upon their arrival they would be registered
by government officials who would then coordinate their transportation onward to Canada
West as quickly and efficiently as possible.[67]

Supporters of the colonial administration’s approach to the epidemic went to
considerable lengths to dispel the accusation that their strategy for dealing with the
dire conditions faced by the emigrants pointed to a lack of compassion. Instead, they
accused those who were demanding the removal of the emigrant sheds of simply wanting the
destitute migrants moved out of sight so that they would not be confronted with their
suffering on a daily basis. Lewis Drummond, a vocal opponent of the Tory administration,
vigorously denied the accusation. He argued that Montrealers of every political stripe had
proven their compassion and humanity countless times throughout the crisis of 1847, but
that they did not have to accept the existence of a “Field of the Dead” mere steps away
from the city.[68]

Opponents of the colonial administration’s approach to the typhus epidemic bristled
at allegations coming from the Tory press and the Emigrant Committee that their proposals
were reckless and unrealistic. They pointed to other jurisdictions in Britain, British
North America, and the United States that had taken much more decisive action than
Montreal and, in doing so, appeared to have more effectively shielded their citizens from
the typhus epidemic and the other social ills that accompanied the massive wave of Irish
emigration. Liverpool, facing an influx of Irish emigrants exponentially greater than
Montreal, decided by the summer of 1847 to begin using public funds to transport Irish
emigrants who could not support themselves back to Ireland.[69] On this side of the Atlantic Ocean, several American jurisdictions had
imposed levies and restrictions on emigrants that were proving to be highly effective in
diverting the flow of emigrants to American port cities like New York.[70] Closer to home, meanwhile, the small Canada West city of
Brockville had simply elected to ban ship-owners from depositing Irish emigrants on their
docks, forcing them to push onwards up the St. Lawrence River towards Lake Ontario and the
city of Toronto.[71] A frustrated and agitated public
demanded to know why the authorities in Montreal could not impose the same kinds of
restrictions on emigration.[72]

The position taken by the Emigrant Committee, which they acknowledged in their
preface had “given great dissatisfaction,” demonstrates the degree to which the science
surrounding contagious disease remained deeply contested in the mid-nineteenth century.
They dismissed the public’s fears about typhus spreading via miasmas carried on the wind
from the emigrant sheds. They noted that the only people who had fallen ill with the
disease other than the emigrants themselves were those who had come into repeated contact
with them, such as the members of the religious orders providing medical care to the
migrants and the government officials stationed at the sheds. While they conceded the
assertion of the Board of Health that contagious diseases could be spread through the air,
they denied that maintaining the emigrant sheds on the banks of the Lachine Canal posed a
threat to the residents of Montreal. Their assertions were seconded by the Medical
Commissioners appointed by the colonial government,[73] who
explained in their report that, due to the prevailing winds and the impact that the rapids
in the St. Lawrence River had on air currents in the vicinity of Montreal, the likelihood
of typhus being spread via miasmas into the city was all but impossible. Like their
counterparts on the emigrant committee, the Medical Commissioners argued that there was no
rational justification for dismantling the emigrant sheds on the banks of the Lachine
Canal. Supporters of the colonial government’s decision downplayed the fact that by
rejecting the Board of Health’s proposal they were avoiding a considerable public expense,
though that was in keeping with their ideological commitment to budgetary restraint.

Despite the active protest of thousands of Montrealers who signed petitions and
attended public meetings to demand that emigrants be quarantined well outside the city
limits, colonial officials were adamant that the general public was not being placed at
risk by their refusal to budge on this front. In the days following the colonial
government’s rejection of the proposal to build a new quarantine station on the
Îles-de-Boucherville, public outrage was reignited when the colonial office ordered tents
to be erected on the grounds of the Montreal General Hospital in order to provide shelter
to the overflow of typhus patients at the hospital and the emigrant sheds. Denis-Benjamin
Viger, a prominent local politician who had grown critical of the colonial authorities’
handling of the events of 1847, rose to protest this particular decision in parliament.
Viger and other critics of the colonial administration pointed to the tents on the grounds
of the hospital as yet another symbol of the government’s lack of initiative when it came
to addressing the typhus epidemic. All of the studies that colonial officials were
brandishing in an attempt to demonstrate that the public was not at risk of contracting
typhus from the emigrants were worthless, Viger maintained, in the face of the public
knowledge that people in every single Montreal neighbourhood had been struck by the
disease.[74] Viger painted a bleak picture of the city that
the colonial administration’s allegedly hands-off approach to addressing the epidemic had
created, one with a landscape dotted with hastily erected emigrant sheds and hospital
tents, where fear of contracting typhus hung over every single household, and where gaunt,
fever-stricken emigrants huddled on the wharves. Viger was not alone in pinning the
colonial administration with the blame for the precipitous drop in commercial activity
that accompanied the epidemic, as merchants and other visitors from the United States,
Britain, and the city’s immediate rural hinterland began avoiding Montreal for fear of
contracting the disease. An editorial in La Minerve
echoed Viger’s observations, describing the eerie quiet that blanketed the
city’s streets.[75]

The defenders of the Tory-led colonial administration did not let these sorts of
allegations and insinuations pass without comment. They accused their political foes,
which included certain members of the Board of Health appointed by the municipal
government, of causing damage to Montreal’s reputation and for needlessly sowing panic in
a community that was already reeling from a public health crisis. With legitimate
authority during this period being so closely linked to a public figure’s ability to
demonstrate composure and restraint, the Emigrant Committee’s suggestion that members of
the Board of Health lacked the resolve to stand up to public opinion and were needlessly
panicked was a highly contentious and political allegation. The Emigrant Committee vowed
not to bend to the demands of a frightened public in the way that the Board of Health had
done with their impractical plans for building an entirely new quarantine station from
scratch on a not easily accessible island down the river from the city.[76] These sorts of character attacks were common in the fraught
political landscape of mid-nineteenth-century Montreal.[77]
It was during moments of crisis like the typhus epidemic that politicians looking to meet
these requirements came under the most scrutiny, and when references to these
prerequisites for engaging in public life were discussed most vigorously.[78]

One consistently contentious point throughout the epidemic was whether or not
political élites ought to discuss the abysmal conditions found at the emigrant sheds.
Critics of the Tory administration maintained that this should be a matter of public
knowledge, while Tories countered that the members of the Reform faction appointed to the
Board of Health were simply trying to stir up popular hysteria for political ends, and in
doing so were damaging Montreal’s reputation.[79] As much as
these two political factions might have been divided by the different solutions they were
proposing to deal with the public health crisis, they shared this language that placed a
heavy premium on composure and restraint.[80] The first
report of the Board of Health, with its stern warnings about the need for the more
effective policing of sanitary infractions, placed a great deal of emphasis on how these
measures ought to be undertaken in an atmosphere of calm and restraint. They insisted, for
example, that the situation provided grounds for “precaution rather than alarm.”[81] Despite the public’s alarm about the epidemic, political élites
from both factions used the unfolding crisis to demonstrate their ability to remain
composed and restrained in such a climate, an assertion that they hoped would have
positive implications in a larger political context.

In essence, the Emigrant Committee had laid out a project of reform that would see
the sheds along the Lachine Canal upgraded to a full-fledged quarantine station that would
more effectively capture the balance between the need to quarantine sick emigrants before
they dispersed into the general public, while not infringing too heavily on the liberty of
the emigrants themselves. It demonstrates how two competing bodies of governing élites, in
a moment of crisis, were actively engaging in the process of thinking through liberal
governance. The Board of Health had proposed measures that tackled the epidemic and the
larger crisis around emigration as a governance problem that could be improved with a more
effective infrastructure. It spoke in the reform-oriented language of the day by
suggesting that the suffering of both migrants and the fears of the Montreal public could
be addressed simultaneously by investing in an infrastructure that would make the entire
migratory process more efficient and effective. The measures that were adopted by the
Emigrant Committee expressed similar aspirations about reforming the infrastructure around
migration, but were concerned that the Board of Health might have been overstating the
efficiency of their proposal, that it marked a small but important step towards a more
authoritarian style of governance with regard to the rights of emigrants, and that it
placed too heavy a burden on the public purse.[82]

Historians of public health have long noted the tension inherent in the adoption of
quarantine as a means of dealing with an outbreak of epidemic disease. On the one hand, it
demonstrates the ability of the state to harness its resources in an extremely
concentrated fashion in order to protect its citizenry. In doing so, however, it exposes
local authorities to continuous challenges to their authority, which comes in a variety of
forms. This was certainly the case in Montreal during the summer of 1847. Steamboat
operators flagrantly ignored the restrictions that Trinity House attempted to impose
regarding where emigrants were permitted to disembark in the city; the relatives and
friends of the emigrants being detained in the sheds along the banks of the Lachine Canal
frequently breached the perimeter of the area in order make contact with them; and those
same emigrants, after a long and taxing migratory journey, often attempted to conceal the
outwardly visible symptoms of illness in order to hasten their dismissal from the
quarantine process. All of these acts amounted to a highly public demonstration of how, in
the face of a complex public crisis like a transnational outbreak of epidemic disease,
officials at the civic, colonial, and imperial level faced severe and problematic
limitations on their authority.[83] The often conflicting
responses to the epidemic also illustrate the competing social, political, and economic
visions present in a liberal society — from those with an isolationist perspective to the
commercial interests who devoted themselves to attacking any attempt to impose
restrictions on transatlantic and international commerce.[84] How the authorities juggle these competing demands can tell us a great deal
about how competing factions of the élite in Montreal balanced ideological approaches to
governance and the demands of an assertive public sphere.

In recent years historians have pointed to the middle of the nineteenth century as a
moment when British North America’s political élite embarked on a liberal project.[85] While this approach to governance affected urban Canadians in
their daily lives, it was during moments of crisis like the typhus epidemic of 1847 that
the public debated the contours of those values. The heated debate over how to address the
public health crisis unfolding in Montreal illustrates the flexibility of those governing
principles. The debate over quarantine that pitted the officials appointed by the colonial
administration against the Board of Health, appointed by the municipal government, was not
a confrontation between liberalism and ancien regime
values. Both bodies adhered, broadly speaking, to the liberal values that were
in the process of re-ordering social and economic relationships across the North Atlantic
world during this period. They both saw a need for various tentacles of the state to more
effectively manage a disorderly situation, yet believed that there was merit in doing so
with a certain degree of restraint. In the midst of this crisis, both bodies remained
focused on the larger project of shaping sick and destitute migrants into productive
citizens. These shared values, however, did not produce a singular response to the crisis
at hand — local conditions continued to produce very different approaches to governance.
Montreal was a city whose confrontation with typhus was shaped by its commercial position
in British North America, its recent history of sectarian and political conflict, and the
jurisdictional tension between the civic, colonial, and imperial governments that had a
stake in the response.

In August, as deaths from typhus and the arrival of emigrants began their steady
decline, the Board of Health issued its final report, which heaped scorn upon the colonial
administration for their perceived lack of support throughout the crisis. In order for a
body like the Board of Health to make a positive impact during a public health crisis,
they argued, they would have required greater financial resources and exclusive powers.
Instead, the report argued, the Board of Health was forced to operate on a shoestring
budget, and much of their time was taken up with jurisdictional squabbling with the
Emigrant Committee appointed by the colonial administration and Trinity House. When the
civic government established the Board of Health they did so with sweeping rhetoric about
the extraordinary powers that the body had been granted. It was not long before the
physicians and civic élites appointed to the board began to realize that these
much-vaunted powers were “illusory.”[86] The practical
solutions that might have made a real impact on the city’s bout with typhus — like
diverting emigrants from the city, regulating the conditions onboard the ships that
ferried emigrants to the colony and up the St. Lawrence River, ensuring that the
conditions in the emigrant sheds were conducive to recuperation and good health — all fell
under the jurisdiction of other bodies and levels of government. Forced to operate under
these stifling limitations, the only activity that the Board of Health could really engage
in were sanitary inspections of the city, but even then they had to report violations that
they discovered to the civic government, who would pursue the matter through the police
force.[87]

By the end of the summer of 1847, the typhus epidemic was beginning to subside, but
the city was staggering under the weight of loss. The emigrant sheds along the banks of
the Lachine Canal would continue to operate until the spring of 1848, although the number
of patients housed within its walls would drop steadily from its peak reached the summer
before. In many ways, history repeated itself as fears of a more general outbreak of
typhus receded. As was the case in 1832, many of the emergency measures put in place in an
effort to halt the spread of the disease were eliminated once the threat subsided.[88] That the crisis did not lead to an immediate overhaul of the
colony’s approach to managing migration and public health should not lead us to dismiss
the epidemics that struck Montreal in the first half of the nineteenth century as simply
the pre-history of the public health movement that emerged in the city in the 1850s and
1860s.[89] While the sanitary regulations imposed by the
Board of Health disappeared along with it, the idea that private property could be subject
to policing in order to insure that the public was not being placed in danger by the
recklessness of private citizens was given a significant boost by the epidemic. The decade
that followed brought about a huge increase in public and private investment in drains and
sewers.[90] The epidemic also fuelled an emerging consensus
that the colonial administration ought to play a more active role in regulating migration
into the colony.[91] Anger towards the imperial government
for their perceived lack of engagement with the epidemic, along with their perceived
mishandling of the crisis in Ireland, added legitimacy to the argument that local élites
needed to gain greater autonomy in the management of colonial affairs.[92] Local officials, including one of the men who had served on the
Emigrant Committee, argued that it was the imperial government’s responsibility to
regulate transatlantic migration more effectively. Colonial politicians were especially
vocal in demanding that Britain reform its Passengers Act, in order to improve sanitary
conditions on board ships making the transatlantic voyage, in the hopes that emigrants
would arrive in Canada in better health than they had in 1847.[93]

During the summer of 1847 Montreal was shaken by a transnational crisis rooted in
how people, ideas and goods circulated the North Atlantic world in the age of global
capitalism and liberal governance. The debates prompted by the Irish famine migration and
the typhus epidemic that accompanied it provide a glimpse into how political élites and
the broader public were thinking through the challenges posed by the rapid social
transformation unfolding around them. While political élites might have reached a
consensus that public health and emigration needed to be effectively managed by government
bodies, the contours of such measures were open to vigorous debate and countless acts of
resistance. Moments such as this allow us to trace the development of the liberal project
of governance in Canada. They push us to consider the role that social crises played in
this process, as these moments of individual and collective vulnerability were when the
impact of government intervention weighed most heavily on the public consciousness. In the
case of Montreal, a city where the global transformations of the mid-nineteenth century
left a deep mark on the social fabric, the events of 1847 played a crucial role in shaping
how political élites and the broader public were thinking through issues surrounding urban
governance, migration, and the role of government as the city grew from a colonial outpost
into an industrial metropolis.

Parties annexes

Note biographique

Dan Horner is the L.R. Wilson Post-Doctoral Fellow in Canadian History at McMaster University and a member of the Montreal History Group.

Several recent contributions to the historiography of the Irish famine have
identified the crisis as a product of liberal colonial governance. For example, see Dave
Nally, Human Encumbrances: Political Violence and the Great
Irish Famine (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011); Phillip
O’Regan, “‘A dense mass of petty accountability’: Accounting in the Service of Cultural
Imperialism during the Irish Famine, 1846–1847,” Accounting,
Organizations and Society 35, no.4. (May 2010): 416–30; Christine Kinealy,
A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland
(London: Pluto Press, 1997) and ibid., The Great
Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion (London: Palgrave, 2002). For more
on the Irish famine migration to North America, see Donald MacKay, Flight from Famine: The Coming of the Irish to Canada
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990); Andy Beilenberg, ed., The Irish Diaspora (London: Longman, 2000); Kirby Miller,
Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North
America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); and both Kinealy studies.

Michel Ducharme, Le concept de liberté au Canada à
l’époque des Révolutions atlantiques, 1776-1838 (Montréal-Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). For an international perspective on this process,
see Geoff Eley, “Nations, Public and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the
Nineteenth Century,” in Habermas and the Public
Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 1992), 289–332; and
Catherine Hall, “The Rule of Difference: Gender, Class and Empire in the Making of the
1832 Reform Act,” in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and
Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Ida Bloom, Karen Hagemann,
and Catherine Hall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 107–35.

Ian McKay, “The Liberal Order Framework: A Prospectus for a Reconnaissance of
Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review 81
(December 2000): 617–45; Michel Ducharme and Jean-François Constant, “Introduction: A
Project of Rule Called Canada — The Liberal Order Framework and Historical Practice,” and
Ian McKay, “Canada as a Long Liberal Revolution: On Writing the History of Actually
Existing Canadian Liberalisms, 1840s–1940s,” in Liberalism
and Hegemony: Debating the Canadian Liberal Revolution, ed. Jean-François
Constant and Michel Ducharme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 3–32; 347–452;
Cecilia Morgan, Public Men and Virtuous Women: The Gendered
Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1996).

For more on mid-nineteenth-century liberal governance, see Patrick Joyce,
The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern
City (London: Verso, 2003); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

A powerful case study of this process can be found in Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics and the Census
of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002).

Howard Markel, Quarantine: Eastern European Jewish
Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997); Charles Rosenberg, The Cholera
Years: The United States in 1832, 1849 and 1866 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1962); Micheal Bliss, Plague: A Story of Smallpox in
Montreal (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1992); Esyllt Jones, Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007); Mark Harrison, Disease and the Modern World: 1500 to the Present Day (Cambridge, UK: Polity
Press, 2004), especially chap. six, “The Individual and the State”; Marola Espinosa,
Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence,
1878–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Peter Baldwin,
Contagion and the State in Europe, 1830–1930
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

For more on nineteenth century demographic change in Montreal, see Sherry Olson
and Patricia Thornton, Peopling the North American City:
Montreal 1840–1900 (Montréal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011).

Dan Horner, “Taking to the Streets: Crowds, Politics and Identity in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century Montreal,” (Ph.D. diss., York University, 2010); Allan Greer,
The Patriots and the People: The Rebellion of 1837 in Rural
Lower Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); James Jackson,
The Riot That Never Was: The Military Shooting of three
Montrealers in 1832 and the Official Cover-Up (Montréal: Baraka Books, 2009).

This group of reformers in Montreal have not been the exclusive subject of a
study, but for a revealing examination of a similar network in New York, see David Scobey,
Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City
Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).

A number of commentators argued throughout the epidemic that Montreal should
concentrate its resources on helping its “own” poor, rather than squandering their
resources on the migrants passing through the city. For an example of this sort of
rhetoric, see the letter written by Augustus Gugy published in La Minerve (14 octobre 1847).

For more on the 1832 epidemic, see See Geoffrey Bilson, A Darkened House: Cholera in Nineteenth-Century Canada
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980); and Robert. For a survey of Lower Canada’s
emigration policy from the ancien regime to the
twentieth century, see Martin Pâquet, Tracer les marges de
la cité: étranger, immigrant et État au Québec, 1627–1981 (Montréal: Boréal,
2005).

The Montreal press frequently reported on the British military’s efforts to
suppress rioting and other acts of collective violence in Ireland in the midst of the
disorder caused by the famine. See, for example, Montreal
Gazette (8 June 1847).

New York’s legislation held the master’s of ships responsible for the migrants
that they were depositing in the state. The most significant clause in the legislation
imposed fines on masters should any of the migrants in their care continue to be a reliant
on public assistance in the State of New York more than two years after their arrival.
When enacted in concert with other charges and restrictions, transporting migrants to New
York became too risky a venture for shipping interests. For a description of the law and
the opinion of Lord Grey of the British Colonial Office on its merits, see Journals of the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada,
Session 1848, vol. 7 (Montréal: Rollo Campbell, 1848), Appendix W.

Scott See, Riots in New Brunswick: Orange Nativism
and Social Violence in the 1840s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993);
Graeme Wynn, Timber Colony: A Historical Geography of Early
Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981).

It must be noted here that the municipal government was itself an institution
that was still in its infancy in 1847, having only been established at the outset of the
1840s by the colonial administration. For more on the founding of Montreal’s civic
government and its liberal ethos, see Michèle Dagenais, “The Municipal Territory: A
Product of the Liberal Order?” in Liberalism and
Hegemony, 201–20.

A number of tracts linking the sanitation of towns and public health were
published and widely read in the 1840s. For example, see R.D. Grainger, Unhealthiness of Towns: Its Causes and Remedies (London:
Charles Knight & Co.,1845); and Henry Scading, Cleanliness Akin to Godliness (Toronto: Diocesan Press, 1850).

For examples, see Montreal Gazette (5
July 1847). Some depositions describing sanitary complaints can be found in the records
left by the Board of Health. Archives de la Ville de Montréal (hereafter AVM), Board of
Health fonds, VM45 S1 SS2.

The Boucherville Islands were part of the seigneurie that was granted to Pierre
Boucher in 1664, and the land was put into agricultural production shortly thereafter. By
1847, a sizeable piece of this seigneurial property was owned by brewing magnate John
Molson, who kept a residence there. In the twentieth century it was briefly the site of an
amusement park, before being established as Îles-de-Boucherville National Park in 1984.

Ibid. (4 June 1847). The Gazette carried
out a campaign against steamboat operators who continued to ignore these regulations,
printing their names in the paper in an effort to shame them into curtailing the practice.
Montreal Gazette (5 July 1847).

These plans were often informed by memories of the cholera epidemics of 1832,
which began in emigrant communities before quickly spreading out into the general
population. For more on the reaction to the 1832 epidemic, see Bilson.

For a discussion of the debates on the miasmatic theory and typhus, see Margaret
Crawford, “Typhus in Nineteenth-Century Ireland,” in Medicine, Disease and the State in Ireland, 1650–1940, eds. Greta Jones and
Elizabeth Malcolm (Cork: Cork University Press, 1999), 131.

Montreal Gazette (15 July 1847). The
area around Montreal’s harbourfront and the Lachine Canal had long been considered by
civic élites and the broader public to be a nexus of social disorder. This was ground zero
for the environmental and social transformations associated with industrialization. The
area was home to many of the itinerant labourers who worked in the port. During the 1840s,
it was home to Irish migrant labourers hired to expand the Lachine Canal. Facing the
combined pressures of low wages and poor working conditions, the shantytowns built to
house these labourers became the site of labour revolts and collective violence. See Jason
Gilliland, “Muddy Shore to Modern Port: Redemensioning the Montreal Waterfront
Time-Space,” Canadian Geographer 48, no. 4
(Winter 2004): 448–70; Dan Horner, “Solemn Processions and Terrifying Violence: Spectacle,
Authority and Citizenship during the Lachine Canal Strike of 1843,” Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine XXXVIII,
no. 2 (Spring 2010): 36–47.

Montreal Gazette (2 July 1847). In
addition to the danger this posed to Montrealers, a letter to the editor published in the
Gazette reported that the shallow waters
immediately adjacent to the emigrant sheds were particularly unhealthy, as they had long
served as an informal dumping ground for the city. Observers reported seeing a number of
horse corpses that had been disposed of in the area.

The literature on Victorian masculinity emphasizes the importance placed on
restraint and composure during this period. For example, see Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian
England (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 2006); Ben Griffin,
The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity,
Political Culture and the Struggle for Women’s Rights (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 2012); John Tosh, A Man’s Place:
Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1999).

For another example of commercial interests opposing quarantine, see Dorceta
Taylor, The Environment and the People in American Cities,
1600s–1900s: Disorder, Inequality and Social Change (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009), 107.

For more on how Montreal’s civic élites confronted epidemics in later decades
that makes this argument about earlier outbreaks, see Bruce Curtis, “Social Investment in
Medical Forms: The 1866 Cholera Scare and Beyond,” Canadian
Historical Review 81, no. 3 (September 2000): 347–79.

For a detailed account of the debates surrounding responsible government, see
Phillip Buckner, The Transition to Responsible Government:
British Policy in British North America, 1815–1850 (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1985).

This argument was made forcefully by Adam Ferrie in his open letter to Earl Grey
at the colonial office. See Adam Ferrie, Letter to the Rt.
Hon. Earl Grey, Embracing a Statement of Facts in Relation to Emigration to Canada during
the Summer of 1847 (Montréal: The Pilot, 1847).

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Citer cet article

Horner, Dan. « “The Public Has The Right to be Protected From A Deadly Scourge”: Debating Quarantine, Migration and Liberal Governance during the 1847 Typhus Outbreak in Montreal. » Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada, volume 23, numéro 1, 2012, p. 65–100. https://doi.org/10.7202/1015728ar

APA

Horner, D. (2012). “The Public Has The Right to be Protected From A Deadly Scourge”: Debating Quarantine, Migration and Liberal Governance during the 1847 Typhus Outbreak in Montreal. Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada, 23 (1), 65–100. https://doi.org/10.7202/1015728ar

Chicago

Horner, Dan « “The Public Has The Right to be Protected From A Deadly Scourge”: Debating Quarantine, Migration and Liberal Governance during the 1847 Typhus Outbreak in Montreal ». Journal of the Canadian Historical Association / Revue de la Société historique du Canada 23, no 1 (2012) : 65–100. https://doi.org/10.7202/1015728ar